The present disclosure relates to digital information processing, and particularly to computing image quality scores.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources. For example, video files, audio files, and Web pages for content directed to particular subjects, book articles, or news articles can be accessed over the Internet. A search system can select one or more resources to be referenced by search results in response to receiving a user query that includes one or more search terms or phrases. The search system selects and scores resources based on their relevance to the query and their importance relative to other resources to provide search results that link to the selected resources. The search results are typically ordered according to the scores.
The relevance of resources to a user query can be determined based on the text associated with the resources. For example, text included in the content of the resources can be compared to the query to determine measures of relevance for the resources relative to the query. In turn, the resources are scored based on the measures of relevance and search results referencing the resources are ordered based on the scores.
Images are example resources that can be determined to be relevant to a query based on text associated with the image. The relevance of an image to the search query can be determined, for example, based on text that appears within a specified proximity of the image. For example, an image that is presented on a Web page and within a specified proximity of the text “football” can be determined to be relevant to the queries “football,” and/or “sports” and referenced in search results for these queries.
While text associated with images can be used to compute measures of relevance of the images to a search query, the images that are determined to be relevant to the query based on the text can have varying levels of visual quality. For example, one image that is determined to be relevant to a query may be a high quality image (e.g., proper exposure, accurate color characteristics, and sharp), while another image determined to be relevant to the query may be a low quality image (e.g., under/over-exposed and/or blurry). User perception of the quality of search results can be affected by visual qualities of the images that are referenced by the search results.